I’ve now finished reading Zoe Klippert’s edition of Catherine Hubback’s letters and while it is a sound first step in learning about this second gifted niece of Austen and her writing, it is only a first step, and (alas) the book shows some peculiarities can be explained only as the result of some family control exerted on the editor to stop her from telling the full story glimpsed here. Even with Klippert’s introduction, notes and reachable bibiography, without Alice Villasenor’s Women Readers and the Victorian Jane Austen two chapters, one on Hubback and the other on Anne Austen Lefroy’s daughter, Fanny Caroline Lefroy and her articles on Austen (Temple Bar 1880s) and memoir, I would not have been able to see een as far into The Younger Sister or these letters.

The letters just cover 5 years and there are not many of them. Like so many women’s letters, these are what survived. They are only one side, mostly Catherine’s letters to her oldest son, John, with a few to his wife, Mary; the book is not thick. We can pick up much about the realities of Catherine’s immediate life in California from the letters here which are do not seem to be censored, scissored. That is true. They make sense. The letters are lively, witty, contain astute pictures of American life and type people, ways of life, places. We also see strains in Catherine’s family, between John and the mother and John’s wife. But not much more. This son John left an enormous memoir which was only privately printed and is hard to get hold of. He (John) and his daughter, Edith, wrote the JA’s Sailor Bros and she wrote 3 sequels to Austen’s books, wherein all of them feature a heroine who feels like an exile. So much remains to be elucidated

The introduction to the letters is weak. The barest outline is told; we are not told how Catherine’s husband came to have a breakdown, or what were the circumstances; much is omitted from the life which would be easy and natural to tell. The list of characters in Catherine’s life is bare too, odd. Many people are left out who count (we could at least have had all her siblings) and we are not told why. Fanny Sophia Austen is presumably included so that Klippert can be sure we understand who it was that destroyed the correspondence of Jane and Frank Austen, but I found more helpful information about Hubback’s life and the information about Fanny’s destruction of Jane and Martha Lloyd’s correspondence in Villasenor’s redaction of Fanny Caroline Lefroy’s papers.

It seems to me the explanation for the thinness of the book is at least twofold. First Catherine’s branch of the family feel from the gentry. All three of Catherine’s children (including the son who remained in England) left the cozy landowning navy-clerical appointments-patronage world of the Austens, to find and create work in the business world of the UK at the time, to become selling travelers for firms. This probably because they couldn’t get anything from the family by this time. All the money the Steventon Austen branch of the family had expected first from James Leigh-Perrot, and then from his domineering stingy wife, Jane Leigh-Perrot (yes the one who stole the lack) went to James-Edward Austen-Leigh. There was anger for a while because Frank had been promised the property too, but he displeased the harridan aunt by his marriage to Martha Lloyd (isn’t that interesting) and she instead did give him a payment of 10,000 pounds, with which he was able to buy Portsdown Lodge. Southam mentions this; Mary Austen Austen in her biography of her father, James-Edward Austen-Leigh does; Tomalin at the close of her biography of Jane Austen. Villanesor suggests that Robert Watson’s anger about his lack of inheritance from Emma’s uncle and aunt is a reflection of Frank’s expectations and dependence on help having been thwarted.

Frank had 11 children and that’s a lot to provide for. George Austen had had tenuous patronage; after all Hastings was not the legal father of his niece, Eliza de Feuillide Austen, his sister, Philadelphia had been Hasting’s mistress for only a short time (between his first and second wife) and all were long dead. Catherine’s husband broke down and was put in an asylum, and she had to return to live with her father for some years. Except for John (the eldest) who eventually became stable in one place in the UK, the two sons and their families all moved around continually. Many people in the US did. Catherine Hubback notes (what both Trollopes saw and mention and is found in Wm Dean Howells, Mark Twain, anyone who describes 19th century American life, including Anthony Trollope) how in the US many middle class people lived in boarding houses. It was a frustrating life for married women with families. Edward, her eldest, ended a draftsman for a lumber company, the younger brother, Charles, became a woodchopper and eventually moved in with his older brother. Charles and his wife had had six children, she died after the sixth, and all dispersed. Tomalin at the close of her excellent biography of Jane shows that other members of the Austen ended up impoverished and below the gentry, but this is not the image the family left today wants for themselves.

Catherine Hubback does remind me of Fanny Trollope in her strength; as long as she was alive the sons didn’t do too badly — though again she needed her father’s help who himself lived in Chawton house on Edward’s lcuk and largess. She did present herself as widow in the US (and was at risk of chatting up in one incident she tells). She worked herself and gave, and shortly after these letters contracted pneumonia. She died and was buried in Virginia. I find myself much admiring her, but have learned that people want rather to identify with high class status than someone struggling and surviving as best she can as she loses class status. Among the stories Catherine was willing to tell was that some of the letters Cassandra destroyed were her “triumphing over the married women of her [Jane’s] acquaintance, and rejoicing in her own freedom” and were “most amusing” (Tomalin, 281).

The second area of Catherine’s life and works that could make those who control her papers uncomfortable is her novels mirror the real lives of the Austens which Jane reflected mostly indirectly. The titles reflect the realities of the family, an older wife and younger husband, a wife’s sister married, exile from security. Except for The Watsons Jane kept to a milieu higher than the one she grew up in or lived later when her father died. She avoids too close a literal mirroring in her other books. Her loss of Lefroy is seen through Jane Bennet’s near loss of Charles Bingley say; the three women’s distressed circumstances in the ejection from Norland Park and settling in Barton cottage and so on.

Hubback’s Younger Sister cries out for a decent edition, and from what Klippert says diplomatically about Tamara Wagner’s essays on Hubback for the Victorian Web, they show a lack of real knowledge and have errors of fact (they are again thin like her essay on Sherlock films). It’s curious how hard it is to get Volume 3 of Younger Sister; the other two are easy to get, but without volume 3 the story doesn’t make sense, and I was able to get a copy only through a friend who managed to xerox a rare library copy. I suggest the relatives today are controlling access to this.

It’s a case of a minor Victorian woman novelist not getting her due as yet and nothing being done because of the dead hand of family control together with the reiterated idea (flung at to dismiss women’s writing) that Hubback’s work is not worth it, very minor. Until Elizabeth Grant Smith’s journals (the Highland Lady) were published whole, people said that of her, they no longer do. To read Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrun’s (the artist) full journal is a revelation; the truncated abridged and censored one still on line makes her seem like a facile fool; far from it, astute, witty, a real businesswoman who avoided the guillotine (unlike Eliza Austen’s husband who seems to have run into it) and made a success of hard life of traveling and painting and selling her pictures as far away as freezing St Petersburg.

It’s with these women that Hubback’s still thwarted fate should be seen. They, Julia Kavanagh, Geraldine Jewsbury are coming into print and beginning to be discussed candidly and their works available and treated with respect. Paradoxically, the reason often cited for our paying attention to Hubback at all, her relationship to Austen gets in the way of our paying attention to her.

She is an ignored source for Austen, another real source, and a worthy writer and woman for study in her own right. Her Younger Sister may be considered a historical novel, an imitation of 18th century novels and insofar as she does this, this is part of the reason for the text’s success. In this The Younger Sister reminds me of Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly whose success is the result of a skilled imitation of later 19th century prose and subjective novellas.

8 Responses

Spot on. Excellent. You’re exactly right, if Hubback is to be rediscovered and given her place as an interesting pioneering writing woman, it will be on the American side – not the English. As you say, Jane Austen gets in the way, and the English side isn’t interested in the extreme vitality of her American adventures, consider them sort of worthless. But there’s a rediscovery movement for American women writers as well as English, and hopefully she will get a full biography one day. The family and Austen preservers consider all her most vital qualities (her hucksterism, entrepreneurism, chameleon ways, fighting to thrive despite loss of social status) somewhat deplorable and suspect – the way she flies the “Austen” name and appropriates the material. I can’t tell you how very much she reminds me of Fanny Trollope (as you say) and I see such parallels with my own “Mrs. Elton in America,” if I may say so!

I quite liked the introduction, which is serviceable if thin, and does a good job of setting the scene and introducing the major characters and scenarios, which can be boggingly complicated. It’s awfully hard to keep track of generations of Austens and who got what money and who held which manuscripts. Zoe Klippert clarifies and simplifies things nicely, to make sense for the average reader. And we cannot blame her for not telling the story of John Hubback. Nothing is known about his mental illness – there’s just not the material. It is EXACTLY the sort of thing, of course, that if a family did know, they would conceal! Mental illness was a terrible disgrace then.

I personally think the novels I read of hers were awful, I read a couple and couldn’t even finish, thought them flat and talentless. But how vivid and fabulous her letters are! What a vigorous picture they reveal! Yes, they are like the best English travel writing of that period – the “fish out of water,” seeing 19th century America through the eyes of an adventurous reporter, interested in life. She deserves a biography for these alone, and her unbelievable life. Now, I think I must attempt to read The Younger Sister book, definitely, since at least the first two volumes are online. You say it’s good, and it will be interesting to see what she does with the Austen story there. So I will. Hubback interests me for a lot of reasons. I’ve always been fascinated by women authors of that period who have both English and American experiences – not only Fanny Trollope but Frances Hodgson Burnett too, and Sisters in the Wilderness. It’s so interesting to see both cultures through their experiences; coming to 19th century America, England seems both longed-for, missed, superior, and yet as antique in its values as a tenth century Chinese court.

Well the introduction need not have been that thin. It’s very odd what’s left out. For example, the list of people in Hubback’s life is strange; central people omitted — like her father, her stepmother. I’m sure Klippert could have given strong vignettes from her obvious reading. Also the other siblings. And Klippert could have told us about the business-lawyer failings. Trollope did that for his father.

I would say it’s the English take on American that you may like, Diana: I’ve read a lot of 19th century travel books and she reminds me or more English travelers than Fanny Trollope (though the life perspective is that of a strong women shepherding her family members through a hard world). It’s quite different from Americans. English people can’t get over the landscape and a lack of continual class dividing up of whatever is happening. Her book is very different from say Howells (who is Anglophilic).

I can’t claim to have read the novels beyond The Younger Sister, just dipped and they seemed interesting, melodramatic yes but then so is Dickens. I feel suspicious of the dismissals. There is a lot of enjoyed scorn of Anna Austen Lefroy’s Mary Hamilton: it’s a little gem, melancholy in the extreme but controlled, lovely in tone. So maybe there is a good one besides the Agnes Milbourne which is praised (and tellingly the one which is not connected to the Austen background. Our flawed ideas of originality come in here.

But thank you very much for your enthusiastic endorsement and commentary.

I do love the English side (when Fanny Trollope is disgusted by spittoons, or Catherine Moodie reports about the backwoods servant who holds the hambone in her fist whle carving, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s vignettes of all sorts of types he meets. But I love the American side too – when Burnett’s strong minded American heroines “show” the effete class ridden English ladies a thing or two. I love the “fish out of water” fresh view of the two contrasting sets of manners – you might call these memoirs of manners. It’s also the dichotomy within one writer that I find so endlessly fascinating, and Hubback has that. She’s from the very heart of Jane Austen’s own world yet there she is, smack in Laura Ingalls Wilder/Rose Wilder Lane territory! I love it! I see you are suspicious of the dismissals of her fiction, but honestly and truly I have no agenda and haven’t been influenced by anybody: the ones I read were so gaspingly far from Dickens, they were almost unreadable in their poorness and thinness. She must have run out of steam when she didn’t have her aunt’s work for a springboard, or maybe she was writing too fast, trying to make money. I had to give up on them, and I love trashy Victorian fiction but they were too bad even for me. I *must* read The Younger Sister! I admit I only skimmed Mary Hamilton and was busy and distracted at the time: didn’t give it a fair shot. When people were discussing it afterwards I realized I’d just not given it proper attention. I’ll try again sometime; obviously a book by Anna Lefroy has to be of intense interest, and enough people have said there’s something in it. I admit I didn’t give it a chance…but I certainly did with the other Hubbacks! Hard to believe that the woman who wrote them, also wrote those vivid letters. But when writing the letters, she had real material and was a natural born journalist (like F. Trollope).

I Have found Julia Kavanagh’s Rachel Grace (the one I could afford as it’s in one volume) not as strong as it’s claimed for her _Adele_ and other _Jane Eyre_ governess theme novels. The one by Hubback recommended is _Rival Suitors_ (a novella) and after that Agnes Milbourne_.(which sounds like it anticipates Mary Ward’s religious-conflict novels).

It could be that like Andrew Davies, her work is weaker when she does not have an intermediary controlling text, but his original work has strong merits.

On the British versus American traveler: the Americans (and I’m one of them) seek out their deep memories from the imagined dream world of books and art; these are the sites de memoire. These are their cores of identity they deluded themselves over — so to speak. Howells, James, Wharton, Hawthorne do this. I was disillusioned withint 3 days of seeking those White Cliffs of Dover. The British going to the US are confronted with a vastness, a historylessness, a lack of text and feel they are immersing themselves in some kind of energetic savagery (as in the Niagara Falls, the Mississippi, the huge mountains and redwood trees). The Trollopes both, Jameson in Canada do this, so too Hubback in California (though she has a curious tendency to try to find the genteel socialized enclave).

I am also searching for Volume 3 of The Younger Sister and cannot find it anywhere. I was slow to warm up to volume 1, but by the end of volume 2 I have been drawn in; I am enjoying the story and would really like some closure! If anyone can tell me where to find it, please do! Thanks!